1874–1954 · United States · 20th century
Charles Ives (1874–1954) was an American composer from Connecticut who also worked in insurance for many years. His music joins folk songs and church hymns with sharp, dissonant harmony. For pianists the key titles are the Concord Sonata, his songs with piano and the quarter-tone pieces for two pianos.
Charles Ives was born on 20 October 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. His father, George, was a military bandmaster who served in the US Army during the Civil War. The Ives family counted among the leading households of the town: its members were active in commerce and in improving the town, and they supported the progressive causes of the nineteenth century, among them the movement to abolish slavery.
George ran bands, choirs and orchestras, and gave lessons in theory and in several instruments. He was the first music teacher of both Charles and his brother Moss, working with them on harmony and counterpoint and guiding Charles's first compositions. He had a relaxed attitude to theory and urged his son to try harmonising melodies in two or more keys at once.
Much of the future composer's ear was formed in the town square of Danbury. As a boy he would sit there while the town band led by his father played on one side and other bands played elsewhere on the square at the same time. He took up the drums early, playing in the band his father led, and it was from his father that he learned the songs of Stephen Foster. The folk songs and spiritual and religious hymns of his provincial childhood later shaped his style strongly.
In his teens Ives became a church organist and wrote hymns and songs for services. Among them were the Variations on "America" for organ, which he composed for a concert on 4 July in Brewster, New York. Even today's concert organists find the piece demanding.
In 1893 Ives went to New Haven in Connecticut and joined the Hopkins School, captaining its baseball side. In September 1894 he became a student at Yale University and began studying with Horatio Parker. At Yale he took composition in Parker's class as well as organ, and he graduated in 1898.
Under Parker, Ives wrote choral music close in manner to his teacher's: church pieces and even a campaign song for William McKinley in 1896. He composed his First Symphony as a graduation piece under Parker's guidance.
On 4 November 1894 his father died. It was a crushing blow, yet Ives largely carried on with the musical experiments he had begun alongside him.
Ives stood out at the university: he belonged to student societies, chaired one of the committees and played for the varsity American football team. Traces of college life and sport can be heard in his pieces "Yale-Princeton Football Game" and "Calcium Light Night". He went on working as organist in church until May 1902.
After Yale, Ives joined the actuarial staff of Mutual Life Insurance in New York. In 1899 he joined a different agency, Charles H. Raymond & Co., and remained with it until 1906. When that firm failed in 1907, Ives set up his own agency together with his friend Julian Myrick, Ives & Co., later renamed Ives & Myrick; he worked there until he retired.
In his insurance work Ives devised inventive ways of arranging life insurance for wealthy clients, and these methods laid the groundwork for modern estate planning. In 1918 he published a study of life insurance in relation to inheritance tax, which was well received. It made him well known in the insurance industry, and many of his business acquaintances were taken aback to find out that he composed as well.
His success in insurance let Ives support his family, while music remained a hobby. Until he married he held organist posts in Danbury, New Haven, Bloomfield in New Jersey, and in New York. His marriage to Harmony Twichell came in 1908; she was the daughter of the Congregational minister Joseph Twichell and of Julia Harmony Cushman.
In 1907 Ives had the first of the attacks that he and his family called heart attacks. Health problems stayed with him for the rest of his life, and diabetes was added to them later. Once he had recovered from the 1907 attack, he entered a highly creative phase.
Around 1910 Ives turned to the works now seen as his most accomplished, among them Three Places in New England and the sonata for piano known as the Concord Sonata (formally No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840–60"). In 1920 it was printed privately together with a volume of prose, Essays Before a Sonata, and the composer published a revised version in 1947.
Symphony No. 4 belongs to the same years: four movements, a vast orchestra and a very complex texture. Ives worked on it from 1910 to 1916 and revised it in the 1920s, but it was not played complete until 1965, fifty years after completion and over a decade after the composer died. Another symphony, Universe, he could not finish, held back by illness and by his changing ideas, and today it is played in various editions.
Among the scores of those years is also The Unanswered Question of 1908, written for an unusual ensemble: a trumpet, four flutes and a string quartet. Two writers from New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, influenced it.
Another attack in 1918 left Ives composing very little. In 1922 he published the collection 114 Songs, which holds art songs, pieces from his youth and highly dissonant numbers such as "The Majority". His last piece was the song "Sunrise", written in August 1926, and in early 1927, according to his wife, Ives came downstairs in tears and said he could no longer compose.
Ives kept revising his earlier works and oversaw premieres of his music. In 1930, after continuing health problems, diabetes among them, he left the insurance business. He now had more time for music but could not write anything new. In the 1940s he reworked the Concord Sonata and published it in 1947.
Before the early 1940s Ives's music was rarely performed. For some forty years he arranged or paid for nearly all the performances himself, usually engaging Nicolas Slonimsky to conduct. Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Henry Cowell were among his early champions. Cowell's journal New Music printed a good number of Ives's scores, and Copland, after seeing the 114 Songs, wrote an admiring newspaper article about the collection. In the 1930s Slonimsky conducted a chamber version of Three Places in New England in America and on a European tour, and in 1939 the Concord Sonata was heard at New York's Town Hall, played by John Kirkpatrick.
In the 1940s Arnold Schoenberg gave Ives high praise. In 1946 Lou Harrison gave the first performance of the Third Symphony, and in 1947 Ives received the Pulitzer Prize for it. The Second Symphony was first played in 1951 under Leonard Bernstein, in a New York Philharmonic broadcast. The Iveses tuned in on the radio belonging to their cook and were astonished by how warmly the audience responded.
Ives died in New York City in 1954, on 19 May, after a stroke. His widow, who lived until 1969 and was 92 when she died, left the income from Ives's compositions to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which uses it for the Charles Ives Prize. In 1991 the Connecticut legislature named Ives the state's official composer, and in 2004, fifty years after his death, the Juilliard School devoted six days of concerts to his music.
Ives's music carries hymns and traditional songs, tunes played by town bands at holiday parades, fiddlers from Saturday dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlour ballads and tunes by Stephen Foster. All of this he combined with complex, sharp, dissonant harmony, atonal and polytonal, and with tone-painting devices. He developed an original technique of serial writing and used the quarter-tone system.
Ives was among the first to pursue systematic experiments: quarter tones, polyrhythm, aleatory elements and tone clusters. Many such discoveries were adopted more widely later in the twentieth century. He belonged to the "American Five" of avant-garde composers, whose other members were Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and John Becker.
He wrote for orchestra: Central Park in the Dark, Three Places in New England, overtures and ragtime dances for theatre orchestra. There is also chamber music, including string quartets and violin sonatas, the fourth of them Children's Day at the Camp Meeting, as well as choral works and psalms, the cantata The Celestial Country and 114 songs to texts by American poets. He wrote four numbered symphonies and left the Universe Symphony unfinished.
Among Ives's piano works the Concord Sonata stands out. In the second movement he told the pianist to use a block of wood about 37 cm long to make a huge cluster, and every movement quotes the first bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. For two pianos Ives wrote the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces in the 1920s. Many of his songs also have a piano part. Between 1933 and 1943 Ives himself also made a series of piano recordings.
Pianist John Kirkpatrick played the Concord Sonata at New York's Town Hall in 1939, and the major New York newspapers responded favourably. In the 1950s the English pianist Lloyd Powell, then living in Canada, played all of Ives's piano works in a concert series at the University of British Columbia. The recordings the composer made himself came out on CD in 2006 under the title Ives Plays Ives, and David Gray Porter, a musicologist, rebuilt a piano concerto called Emerson from Ives's sketches.
The site currently has one of his publications: the song "Songs My Mother Taught Me" for voice and piano, at the Advanced level. There is no other Ives sheet music in the catalogue, so this is the place to begin getting to know him.